This morning I was wakling to work and enjoying the suinshine on my face when I heard an almightly thud up ahead, which I, at first, thought was the sound of a bus colliding witha blossom filled low lying branch - for as soon as the thud sounded the sky was filled with white blobs that I, at first, assumed were blossom. It swiftly dawned on me that it was a bit late for blossom and as I drew closer I realised the blobs were downy feathers. Closer still I spotted the body of a wood pigeon, trying desperately to suck in its last breath. The bus had collided with the bird in flight and now it was just roadkill, everyone watching looked mortified. Poor thing. I felt the event had a sort of melancholic beauty to it and decided to write a haiku, as it seemed appropriate form for to express such a feeling.
Wednesday 25 May 2011
Tuesday 24 May 2011
Progress with the Unfinished|Unreleased project...
When I talked about finishing off the unfinished Kiyomori album last week I wasn't sure if I'd actually ever do it!! A number of factors ought to have conspired against me - I shouldn't have found the time, I might not have had the resources - I ought to have started it, gotten bored and then not finished!! Instead things are looking pretty good. I'm already most of the way there, I'd say, although with each day I seem to find a half finished song tucked away on an old hardrive or something and I start wondering if it ought to be included or not and as my tracklist reaches the higher teens I start wondering if it is more of a double album!!
Part of me wants to call it quits now and leave off songs like Rendition, Not In My Name, Deliverance and Invisible Hands... as we never played them live, Sean never settled on bass lines that I can try to replicate and I never finished the lyrics. Part of me wants to finish those and include a couple of weird songs I found last night 'unittled E min thing' and 'Control' - which was about the fourth time we tried to write a song called Control at Sean's behest!!
So anyway, those decisions are yet to be made so I shall present another list (love lists) of all the potential songs and the state they are in. '*'s next to tracks that are finished.
*1. Banging - finished contemporary demo
2. Deliverance - no verse lyrics, no bass-line... good drum and guitar take with working structure.
*3. Dance Like A Robot - finished contemporary demo
4. Not In My Name - no verse lyrics, no bass line... reasonable guitar and drum take.
*5. Fighting Fire With Fire - thought I'd lost this one but found another copy of the original session, bass was all on keyboards and a little thin so I recorded a bassline, mixed it and now it's finished.
*6. Unsung|Unstrung - Now finished, with synths, bass and additional vocals.
*7. Puppet On A String - finished contemporary demo
8. Gekokujo - Almost finished - need to try and mix it so the new vocal hides the old better (mix has vocal so can't get rid of original ad-lib
9. Invisible Hands - have recorded new bass and guitar. Need to write lyrics, record vocals and find Easy Rider samples.
10. What Goes Around - Good version available with adlib vocals - need to record the written lyrics over this and mix it so the new vox replace the old.
*11. Bird In A Cage (Part 2) - finished with new bass-line, synth, extra vocals
*12. The World They Built For Us - finished contemporary demo
13. More To Lose - needs bass/synth/extra guitar (possibly)
14. Tick Tock - nearly finished, added midi drums to original demo and bass/guitar/synth now thinking it could do with strings!!!
*15. Virtually - I remember Kiyomori played a versions of Virtually a few times, but forgot we'd recorded this version, which was only missing a bass line, so I finished it off.
16. Control - kind of weird little rough thing... repeats same thing for about 2 mins might be nice as a bonus or interlude
17. Untitled Emin - this jam had a lot of potential... nice bass line/sound from Sean. Not sure if I can make something useable out of what I've found and the opening adlib lyric - "something in her eyes said no" Is creepy in the extreme... so I'm thinking about ditching this one!!
Part of me wants to call it quits now and leave off songs like Rendition, Not In My Name, Deliverance and Invisible Hands... as we never played them live, Sean never settled on bass lines that I can try to replicate and I never finished the lyrics. Part of me wants to finish those and include a couple of weird songs I found last night 'unittled E min thing' and 'Control' - which was about the fourth time we tried to write a song called Control at Sean's behest!!
So anyway, those decisions are yet to be made so I shall present another list (love lists) of all the potential songs and the state they are in. '*'s next to tracks that are finished.
*1. Banging - finished contemporary demo
2. Deliverance - no verse lyrics, no bass-line... good drum and guitar take with working structure.
*3. Dance Like A Robot - finished contemporary demo
4. Not In My Name - no verse lyrics, no bass line... reasonable guitar and drum take.
*5. Fighting Fire With Fire - thought I'd lost this one but found another copy of the original session, bass was all on keyboards and a little thin so I recorded a bassline, mixed it and now it's finished.
*6. Unsung|Unstrung - Now finished, with synths, bass and additional vocals.
*7. Puppet On A String - finished contemporary demo
8. Gekokujo - Almost finished - need to try and mix it so the new vocal hides the old better (mix has vocal so can't get rid of original ad-lib
9. Invisible Hands - have recorded new bass and guitar. Need to write lyrics, record vocals and find Easy Rider samples.
10. What Goes Around - Good version available with adlib vocals - need to record the written lyrics over this and mix it so the new vox replace the old.
*11. Bird In A Cage (Part 2) - finished with new bass-line, synth, extra vocals
*12. The World They Built For Us - finished contemporary demo
13. More To Lose - needs bass/synth/extra guitar (possibly)
14. Tick Tock - nearly finished, added midi drums to original demo and bass/guitar/synth now thinking it could do with strings!!!
*15. Virtually - I remember Kiyomori played a versions of Virtually a few times, but forgot we'd recorded this version, which was only missing a bass line, so I finished it off.
16. Control - kind of weird little rough thing... repeats same thing for about 2 mins might be nice as a bonus or interlude
17. Untitled Emin - this jam had a lot of potential... nice bass line/sound from Sean. Not sure if I can make something useable out of what I've found and the opening adlib lyric - "something in her eyes said no" Is creepy in the extreme... so I'm thinking about ditching this one!!
Tuesday 17 May 2011
On blogging and mucking about with old Kiyomori mixes
I had been thinking of my blog as a sort of semi-private thing, but looking at the stats today it seems I'm probably wrong. Much of what I've done online in the last few years has been music related, and I've done what I can to promote it to my friends, and anybody else I can reach, asking all to listen to what I've been doing. There's been a lot of self-promotion and that does tend to be the way of the internet and social networking, often we find we're only listening to one person's self-promotion in the hope they will reciprocate when we've got something to say ourselves!
However blogging has always seemed to me to be somehow more private, I kept a blog on myspace for a long time and over the years I've found myself glancing back through it as one would an old diary. Sometimes that's been practical, like re-learning the lyrics to an old song I'm busting out; and at others it's just been to remenisce and wander through my old thoughts. I never really got a sense that I had readers or that people were following my sporadic blogging. Apart from very occasionally from a handful of close friends I never really got any responses to my monologues, so I started to think of them as an externalisation of my internal thought processes, or perhaps a way of organising my thoughts before I take them out in public with me.
Today I glanced through the statistics and saw that I've actually had over 100 views, although I'm sure many of those actually came from my returning visits to check my discography entry against recordings I actually had and editting the entries to better reflect reality. Interestingly though I can see that I've had visitors from here (England), Australia, Iran, Germany and America; and that's made me realise how once those thoughts are out there they've been published publically and may come up in google searches on any of the subjects I've discussed. Hopefully this new appreciation of the workings of the blogosphere won't overly affect the things I choose to write about, although I'll happily admit I'll try more than ever to avoid the overly personal... I have no desire to air my dirty laundry in public.
The discography project led me to rediscover a whole bunch of material by my old band Kiyomori that we recorded either while the band was in the process of forming or after we'd recorded and self-released the Uprising EP and started making demos of new material that we hoped to eventually record as an album. For a few years now I suppose I've felt slightly irrationally ashamed of the stuff we did as Kiyomori, the mixture of politics and heavy rock is certainly not to everyone's taste - but I think I started to forget it was to mine! The Manic Street Preachers were one of the first bands I really fell in love with and the Holy Bible, the most visceral of their early albums, was easily my favourite.
I suppose another reason for my Kiyomori-related dispassion was the way in which our plans to follow Uprising with a proper album just slowly stagnated and fell apart. After recording the EP in France we returned home, designed the sleeve, got some copies made and even some badges!! We got copies for sale in local record shops and we got local radio shows to play us, so things seemed to be going well. Then I'm not really sure what went wrong, our promotion of Uprising seemed to stop and we didn't actually release the EP online until a year later, by which point we we'd already decided not to play some of the songs off it any more and we certainly weren't promoting it. At the same time we'd also started the demo's for the album in ernest, making pretty decent home recording versions of songs that had made it to the live set, including Puppet On A String (with some excellent synth work from Tim Mantle), Bangin', The World They Built For Us and Dance Like A Robot. After that we stopped working together effectively, we started lots of things and finished nothing.
I think ultimately we each wanted the band to go in slightly different directions... to my mind we already had an albums worth of material that we just needed to spruce up a bit and then record properly, but this wasn't the album everyone wanted to make. Sean was increasingly vetoing songs and after having many of my ideas rejected I stopped coming up with stuff, I felt like I had no idea what the desired material was supposed to sound like so I stopped trying to write it. We stopped gigging and found ourselves endlessly jamming a handful or riffs and grooves searching for the songs within them that stubbornly refused to materialise... for some reason that just put an image in my head of that Mighty Boosh episode where they come across Razorlight searching in the desert for the 'new sound'.
Anyhow, this discourse on Kioyomori's untimely end has been a detour I really wanted to talk about a new project I've set for myself, I rediscovered a whole load of the songs we'd started recording and not finished and decided that, combined with the 4 songs we already completed home demo's for, they'd make a pretty bloody good album. So I've begun to finish them off for a laugh! A lot of these tracks all come from one session where Ben and I recorded ourselves jamming our way through all our unfinished songs at the time. I had put guide and sometimes ad-libbed vocals on some of them and Ben had cut the more confused jams up into working song structures. When we took this work to Sean he wasn't really into it so it was all abandoned, but I think there are some real corkers in there and I wanted to hear them (sort-of) finished. It's not an easy task, I'm working on top of rough mixes so I can't take anything away (which would be really helpful for some of the ad-libbed vocals that make no sense) but it is quite fun and I can't wait until I've finished and I can sit back and enjoy the Kiyomori album that never was!!
Notes:
Work so far: -
Gekokujo - Rough mix had ad-libbed vocal, guitar, drums and a bass line in the verses (Sean wrote the riff). I finished off the lyrics, matching them to the ad-lib and recorded vocals and put a bass guitar and synth on the track. Currently I'm trying to mix it so the new vocal disguises the old ad-lib, but it's never going to be perfect.
Unsung|Unstrung - This had guitar, drums and a guide vocal. Most of the lyrics were written, so I've just added vocals to reinforce the guide and added bass, additional guitars and keyboards.
Bird in a Cage (Part 2) - This had guitar, drums and a guide vocal. Again I reinforced the guide with more vox, put a bass and some synths on the track... I had to rebuild the intro and outro too as the original was too slapdash for even my DIY tastes.
Tick Tock - We played this live as Kiyomori a number of times but never made a demo. A few years ago I made a ropey home demo with an extra instrumetal outro I had been working on, but my demo never had any drums as I had nothing to make drums with at the time. I've been playing around with writing drums for it using midi, but can tell already this is going to take awhile, I played some beats in using a keyboard, but I'm going to have to go through bar by bar and match the beats to the odd timing of the track, which wanders from the click quite badly and has a different tempo on the outro.
Other tracks:-
Fighting Fire With Fire - I'm gutted about this, we spent ages on it and it was the closest to the standard of the four we considered finished. Sadly it looks like we never mixed it down and Ben's computer has a terrible worm, I booted up the session the other day and tried to mix it down but it only managed 25 seconds before crashing and even then some of the guitar tracks have disappeared. I'll try again to get it off there and failing that I'll record it again from scratch so there's a record as I love the song and it's bizarre structure.
Rendition, Invisible Hands, Deliverance, Not In My Name - I never finished the lyrics to these songs but luckily I have versions with drums & guitar and versions with drums/guitar and adlib. So it should be easy to add bass, vocals and synths when I've written words based on the ad-libs.
What Goes Around - I have a version of this with Ben playing the bass and me doing a terrible ad-lib. Annoyingly there's no instrumental version so I'm going to have to sing the already finished lyrics over a load of gibberish and try to hide it in the mix... nearly finished though and also one we played live once.
More To Lose - I was surprised when I listened to this, it was much more finished than I had thought. I thought it was an abstract collection of ideas but it actually has verses and choruses and all you'd expect. It's drums, guitar and an ad-lib vocal, but the ad-lib vocal actually makes a sort of sense so this one just needs a bass-line and some synth work and it's finished!
However blogging has always seemed to me to be somehow more private, I kept a blog on myspace for a long time and over the years I've found myself glancing back through it as one would an old diary. Sometimes that's been practical, like re-learning the lyrics to an old song I'm busting out; and at others it's just been to remenisce and wander through my old thoughts. I never really got a sense that I had readers or that people were following my sporadic blogging. Apart from very occasionally from a handful of close friends I never really got any responses to my monologues, so I started to think of them as an externalisation of my internal thought processes, or perhaps a way of organising my thoughts before I take them out in public with me.
Today I glanced through the statistics and saw that I've actually had over 100 views, although I'm sure many of those actually came from my returning visits to check my discography entry against recordings I actually had and editting the entries to better reflect reality. Interestingly though I can see that I've had visitors from here (England), Australia, Iran, Germany and America; and that's made me realise how once those thoughts are out there they've been published publically and may come up in google searches on any of the subjects I've discussed. Hopefully this new appreciation of the workings of the blogosphere won't overly affect the things I choose to write about, although I'll happily admit I'll try more than ever to avoid the overly personal... I have no desire to air my dirty laundry in public.
The discography project led me to rediscover a whole bunch of material by my old band Kiyomori that we recorded either while the band was in the process of forming or after we'd recorded and self-released the Uprising EP and started making demos of new material that we hoped to eventually record as an album. For a few years now I suppose I've felt slightly irrationally ashamed of the stuff we did as Kiyomori, the mixture of politics and heavy rock is certainly not to everyone's taste - but I think I started to forget it was to mine! The Manic Street Preachers were one of the first bands I really fell in love with and the Holy Bible, the most visceral of their early albums, was easily my favourite.
I suppose another reason for my Kiyomori-related dispassion was the way in which our plans to follow Uprising with a proper album just slowly stagnated and fell apart. After recording the EP in France we returned home, designed the sleeve, got some copies made and even some badges!! We got copies for sale in local record shops and we got local radio shows to play us, so things seemed to be going well. Then I'm not really sure what went wrong, our promotion of Uprising seemed to stop and we didn't actually release the EP online until a year later, by which point we we'd already decided not to play some of the songs off it any more and we certainly weren't promoting it. At the same time we'd also started the demo's for the album in ernest, making pretty decent home recording versions of songs that had made it to the live set, including Puppet On A String (with some excellent synth work from Tim Mantle), Bangin', The World They Built For Us and Dance Like A Robot. After that we stopped working together effectively, we started lots of things and finished nothing.
I think ultimately we each wanted the band to go in slightly different directions... to my mind we already had an albums worth of material that we just needed to spruce up a bit and then record properly, but this wasn't the album everyone wanted to make. Sean was increasingly vetoing songs and after having many of my ideas rejected I stopped coming up with stuff, I felt like I had no idea what the desired material was supposed to sound like so I stopped trying to write it. We stopped gigging and found ourselves endlessly jamming a handful or riffs and grooves searching for the songs within them that stubbornly refused to materialise... for some reason that just put an image in my head of that Mighty Boosh episode where they come across Razorlight searching in the desert for the 'new sound'.
Anyhow, this discourse on Kioyomori's untimely end has been a detour I really wanted to talk about a new project I've set for myself, I rediscovered a whole load of the songs we'd started recording and not finished and decided that, combined with the 4 songs we already completed home demo's for, they'd make a pretty bloody good album. So I've begun to finish them off for a laugh! A lot of these tracks all come from one session where Ben and I recorded ourselves jamming our way through all our unfinished songs at the time. I had put guide and sometimes ad-libbed vocals on some of them and Ben had cut the more confused jams up into working song structures. When we took this work to Sean he wasn't really into it so it was all abandoned, but I think there are some real corkers in there and I wanted to hear them (sort-of) finished. It's not an easy task, I'm working on top of rough mixes so I can't take anything away (which would be really helpful for some of the ad-libbed vocals that make no sense) but it is quite fun and I can't wait until I've finished and I can sit back and enjoy the Kiyomori album that never was!!
Notes:
Work so far: -
Gekokujo - Rough mix had ad-libbed vocal, guitar, drums and a bass line in the verses (Sean wrote the riff). I finished off the lyrics, matching them to the ad-lib and recorded vocals and put a bass guitar and synth on the track. Currently I'm trying to mix it so the new vocal disguises the old ad-lib, but it's never going to be perfect.
Unsung|Unstrung - This had guitar, drums and a guide vocal. Most of the lyrics were written, so I've just added vocals to reinforce the guide and added bass, additional guitars and keyboards.
Bird in a Cage (Part 2) - This had guitar, drums and a guide vocal. Again I reinforced the guide with more vox, put a bass and some synths on the track... I had to rebuild the intro and outro too as the original was too slapdash for even my DIY tastes.
Tick Tock - We played this live as Kiyomori a number of times but never made a demo. A few years ago I made a ropey home demo with an extra instrumetal outro I had been working on, but my demo never had any drums as I had nothing to make drums with at the time. I've been playing around with writing drums for it using midi, but can tell already this is going to take awhile, I played some beats in using a keyboard, but I'm going to have to go through bar by bar and match the beats to the odd timing of the track, which wanders from the click quite badly and has a different tempo on the outro.
Other tracks:-
Fighting Fire With Fire - I'm gutted about this, we spent ages on it and it was the closest to the standard of the four we considered finished. Sadly it looks like we never mixed it down and Ben's computer has a terrible worm, I booted up the session the other day and tried to mix it down but it only managed 25 seconds before crashing and even then some of the guitar tracks have disappeared. I'll try again to get it off there and failing that I'll record it again from scratch so there's a record as I love the song and it's bizarre structure.
Rendition, Invisible Hands, Deliverance, Not In My Name - I never finished the lyrics to these songs but luckily I have versions with drums & guitar and versions with drums/guitar and adlib. So it should be easy to add bass, vocals and synths when I've written words based on the ad-libs.
What Goes Around - I have a version of this with Ben playing the bass and me doing a terrible ad-lib. Annoyingly there's no instrumental version so I'm going to have to sing the already finished lyrics over a load of gibberish and try to hide it in the mix... nearly finished though and also one we played live once.
More To Lose - I was surprised when I listened to this, it was much more finished than I had thought. I thought it was an abstract collection of ideas but it actually has verses and choruses and all you'd expect. It's drums, guitar and an ad-lib vocal, but the ad-lib vocal actually makes a sort of sense so this one just needs a bass-line and some synth work and it's finished!
On state visits
The Queen begins her historic state visit to Ireland today and I can't help but feel annoyed by it. When president McAleese says it's, 'absolutely the right moment,' for the Queen to visit she can't have been thinking about the economy. There's plenty of republican blood flowing through my veins, from the Irish side of my family, yet I'm not violently opposed to the monarchy here in Britain. I'm happy to ignore them as long as they don't insist on rubbing salt in our wounds - like the recent royal wedding. We're facing a tory government (I'd call them the coalition, but I think Clegg and his cronies leave their liberal and democratic credentials at the door when they turn up to cabinet) who are imposing a diet of strict economic cuts on the nation and they choose to hold an elaborate wedding ceremony with a security bill that costs us more than G20. By all accounts Will's wedding dwarfed the cost of Charles' and all this in a supposed age of austerity.
No the Queen's visit to Ireland is surely both expensive and inappropriate and it reminds me of the popes visit to England last year, which cost UK taxpayers up to 12 million - with the national secular society claiming that hidden security costs, like extra policing, could have seen us paying up to 100 million. I was baptised a Roman Catholic, but I can imagine that particularly grating with all the C of E lot. The 2001 census showed only 9% of the UK population are Catholic and Henry VIIIth got rid of the pope ages ago, the Act of Union in 1707 cemented that. He's just not relevant in England, so then why did we invite him for an expensive state visit?
I can only think that our current government are fans of pomp and circumstance, they want these over blown state occasions and state visits as a tribute to traditional power centres and a spur to some misplaced sense of nationalism. I can imagine them salivating now over the royal photo-ops at next years olympics. I suppose it is marginally better than Maggie Thatcher casting herself as Queen in welcoming back 'our boys' from the folly of the falklands.
So why are the Irish playing along? By all accounts the Queen's visit is costing them equivalent to £6.2 million, add to that the state visit by Obama later this year and you've got the Irish police force worrying their entire annual budget is going to be eaten up by two parasitic sightseers. Everyone understands when the Queen goes to visit somewhere like New Zealand - where, I've been told, the Maori chiefs wrote a letter to the queen asking her to become sovereign... obviously that's a very rose-tinted over simplification of events, but once New Zealand was opened up to the world (by Captain Cook - a Brit) it's leaders decided British rule was preferable to lawless traders and settlers. Nonetheless, there are many members and former members of Britain's once great empire who have fond memories of Britain and monarchy; in Ireland the history is bitter, don't mention Oliver Cromwell, don't ask how many good potatoe crops got exported to England during the potato famine that killed so many, don't mention Bloody Sunday or internment (and I could go on and on).
I do have a theory though, everyone in England must remember the headlines late last year when Britain made out it was single-handedly (alongside the rest of the EU and the IMF) rescuing the Irish economy. You can imagine Osborne insisting on an humiliating Royal visit as part of the deal, particularily if I'm right about this governments desire to make us all more nationalistic. People put up with a lot of shit when they're patriots, just look at all those guys coming back in body bags or with limbs missing from the 'war against terror'. I think that's what Cameron is really after when he talks about the 'big society', he wants us all to muck in together like it's WWII, so he can reinforce the old guard elites of the tory heartland and roll us back to the 80's (or worse) in terms of the welfare system, education and the NHS with a minimum of 'unpatriotic' complainers.
As for Obama visiting, his motivation is clear - state visits to Ireland are good for Irish American votes back home and he's trying to make sure he gets re-elected. US Presidents have been playing this card for years and it's apparently quite effective, presumably it's good in some way for Ireland too, perhaps their American cousins remember to send some business back home or maybe there's no perhaps and this flattery comes with more concrete long term financial incentives. The Obama administration are going to have to get a lot of leg work in before the election, for even the gory glory of Osama Bin Laden's final capture, oh, sorry... execution; hasn't seemed to rub off enough on the presidency. Perhaps he should have relented and published photos of the dead dissident with a bullet in the head. I guess all the votes at home he would have gained would have paled to the potential international outcry... Bin Laden, dead without trial, unarmed and shot in the eye by special forces acting in Pakistan without permission. Sounds like a war crime to me, so where was that outcry?
No the Queen's visit to Ireland is surely both expensive and inappropriate and it reminds me of the popes visit to England last year, which cost UK taxpayers up to 12 million - with the national secular society claiming that hidden security costs, like extra policing, could have seen us paying up to 100 million. I was baptised a Roman Catholic, but I can imagine that particularly grating with all the C of E lot. The 2001 census showed only 9% of the UK population are Catholic and Henry VIIIth got rid of the pope ages ago, the Act of Union in 1707 cemented that. He's just not relevant in England, so then why did we invite him for an expensive state visit?
I can only think that our current government are fans of pomp and circumstance, they want these over blown state occasions and state visits as a tribute to traditional power centres and a spur to some misplaced sense of nationalism. I can imagine them salivating now over the royal photo-ops at next years olympics. I suppose it is marginally better than Maggie Thatcher casting herself as Queen in welcoming back 'our boys' from the folly of the falklands.
So why are the Irish playing along? By all accounts the Queen's visit is costing them equivalent to £6.2 million, add to that the state visit by Obama later this year and you've got the Irish police force worrying their entire annual budget is going to be eaten up by two parasitic sightseers. Everyone understands when the Queen goes to visit somewhere like New Zealand - where, I've been told, the Maori chiefs wrote a letter to the queen asking her to become sovereign... obviously that's a very rose-tinted over simplification of events, but once New Zealand was opened up to the world (by Captain Cook - a Brit) it's leaders decided British rule was preferable to lawless traders and settlers. Nonetheless, there are many members and former members of Britain's once great empire who have fond memories of Britain and monarchy; in Ireland the history is bitter, don't mention Oliver Cromwell, don't ask how many good potatoe crops got exported to England during the potato famine that killed so many, don't mention Bloody Sunday or internment (and I could go on and on).
I do have a theory though, everyone in England must remember the headlines late last year when Britain made out it was single-handedly (alongside the rest of the EU and the IMF) rescuing the Irish economy. You can imagine Osborne insisting on an humiliating Royal visit as part of the deal, particularily if I'm right about this governments desire to make us all more nationalistic. People put up with a lot of shit when they're patriots, just look at all those guys coming back in body bags or with limbs missing from the 'war against terror'. I think that's what Cameron is really after when he talks about the 'big society', he wants us all to muck in together like it's WWII, so he can reinforce the old guard elites of the tory heartland and roll us back to the 80's (or worse) in terms of the welfare system, education and the NHS with a minimum of 'unpatriotic' complainers.
As for Obama visiting, his motivation is clear - state visits to Ireland are good for Irish American votes back home and he's trying to make sure he gets re-elected. US Presidents have been playing this card for years and it's apparently quite effective, presumably it's good in some way for Ireland too, perhaps their American cousins remember to send some business back home or maybe there's no perhaps and this flattery comes with more concrete long term financial incentives. The Obama administration are going to have to get a lot of leg work in before the election, for even the gory glory of Osama Bin Laden's final capture, oh, sorry... execution; hasn't seemed to rub off enough on the presidency. Perhaps he should have relented and published photos of the dead dissident with a bullet in the head. I guess all the votes at home he would have gained would have paled to the potential international outcry... Bin Laden, dead without trial, unarmed and shot in the eye by special forces acting in Pakistan without permission. Sounds like a war crime to me, so where was that outcry?
Monday 9 May 2011
DISCOGRAPHY
This is kind of a discography of intent... by my birthday (October) I'd like to have all of this stuff as a definitive collection, at least for my own records!
[1] rift - "The Opal Fruits" (recorded '97-'98)
1. Be
2. Seatless Lounge
3. Where Did You Go?
4. Losers
5. Purple Haired Girls
6. Jonny Boy
7. TV Dinners
8. Out Of Synch
9. Primary School
10. Tell Me That You Didn't Know...
11. Heartache (Pulmonary Artery)
12. Shopping For Amy
(+'Secret Track')
[2] rift - "EP collection"
{My False Smile EP (99')}
1. My False Smile
2. No Working Title
3. Early Morning Telephone Box
4. Out of Synch (extended version)
{Metway Sessions (00') - I only have poor audio quality for these songs mastered off the radio}
5. Passive Generation
6. Time's Running Out
7. David Jones Is Dead
{Bitter EP ('01)}
8. Bitter
9. Confront Me
10. Heartache (new version)
{Bedroom Sessions ('03)}
11. Don't Change
12. Hikikomori
13. Better Off
[3] Pornography - "Metway Sessions"
1. Kafka Dreams
2. Rozencrancts And Guildenstern Are Dead
[4] Adam Kidd - "...From The Bedroom" ('03-'05)
1. Seven
2. Man In The Business Suit
3. Goodbye To Summer
4. Fallen Angel
5. Butterfly March (instrumental)
6. Wasn't It?
7. Waiting
8. Obsolete|Incomplete
9. Seven Stories
10. Wake Up Tired
11. Better Off
12. Frank Sinatra
13. Another Picture In My Mind
14. After The Storm
[5] Adam Kidd - "B" ('00-'04)
1. Don't Go Back
2. Honesty
3. What's Up With You?
4. Teenage Excess
5. Mothers Sons
6. Butterflies
7. Good Advice
8. We Started The War
9. Not For You
10. No One Home
11. Lament
[6] Adam Kidd - "B2" ('05-'08)
1. Instrumental
2. Any Other Night
3. Blueprint
4. End Of The Tunnel
5. George
6. Human Beings (Virtually prequel)
7. Rough Music (The Balancing Act prequel)
8. Snow Globe
9.Venus Or Mars
10. Whisper Round The Room
11.Eileen's Bench
12. My Garden's A Park
[7] Kiyomori - "Gestation" ('03-'05)
1. Once Upon A Time (demo)
2. M*A*D
3. Could've Been
4. Dogtopiary
5. Not Scared Of You (demo)
6. Solution
7. Soft Betrayal
8. She Goes On (demo)
[8] Kiyomori - "Uprising" ('05)
1. Time By Myself
2. None Of The Above
3. She Goes On
4. Speak Clearly
5. Once Upon A Time
6. Not Scared Of You
[9] Kiyomori - "Unfinished|Unreleased" ('05-'08)
1. Banging
2. Deliverance
3. Dance Like A Robot
4. Not In My Name
5. Fighting Fire With Fire
6. Unsung|Unstrung
7. Puppet On A String
8. Gekokujo
9. Invisible Hands
10. What Goes Around
11. Bird In A Cage (Part 2)
12. The World They Built For Us
13. More To Lose
14. Tick Tock
[10] Adam Kidd - "Sketch (solo demo's for LFLIIP)" ('06-'09)
1. Virtually
2. Into The Night
3. I Won't Tell If You Won't
4. Sunshine
5. Just A Fool
6. Smile
7. Fragile Creatures
8. Have It Their Way
9. Bird in a Cage
10. Slow Down
11. This Strange Dance
12. A Message
[11] Adam Kidd Band - "Looking For Love In Inappropriate Places" ('10)
1. All You Believe In
2. Fragile Creatures
3. Into The Night
4. Bird In A Cage
5. I Won't Tell If You Won't
6. Just A Fool
7. Empty Head
8. Sunshine
9. Slow Down
10. Virtually
11. This Strange Dance
12. A Message
[12] Adam Kidd - "Skeletons In The Closet" ('10-'11)
1. The End Of The World (For Two)
2. Down In The Basement
3. Stowaways
4. Peter Wallner
5. The Stumbling Block
6. When The Dust Settles
7. The Balancing Act
8. Dear Michael
9. Drink The Cup
10. She Makes Me Nervous
11. Fragments of Memory
12. 5/4-6/4
13. Catching Up
[13 + 14] The Pocketwatchers - "Pocketwatching Vol 1 & 2" ('08-'11)
*not formally collected so random track order
1. Cain
2. Keep Falling (With Love)
3. Santa Muerte
4. Speedball II (remix)
5. Heroes
6. Honesty
7. Hands
8. The Journey
9. Dance With Jolie
10. The Pocketwatchers Theme
11. Attack Of The Wraiths
12. Dimitri's Abortion
13. Synaesthesia
14. Storm Clouds
15. Peter Kicks The Wolf
16. The Cowboy Song
[1] rift - "The Opal Fruits" (recorded '97-'98)
1. Be
2. Seatless Lounge
3. Where Did You Go?
4. Losers
5. Purple Haired Girls
6. Jonny Boy
7. TV Dinners
8. Out Of Synch
9. Primary School
10. Tell Me That You Didn't Know...
11. Heartache (Pulmonary Artery)
12. Shopping For Amy
(+'Secret Track')
[2] rift - "EP collection"
{My False Smile EP (99')}
1. My False Smile
2. No Working Title
3. Early Morning Telephone Box
4. Out of Synch (extended version)
{Metway Sessions (00') - I only have poor audio quality for these songs mastered off the radio}
5. Passive Generation
6. Time's Running Out
7. David Jones Is Dead
{Bitter EP ('01)}
8. Bitter
9. Confront Me
10. Heartache (new version)
{Bedroom Sessions ('03)}
11. Don't Change
12. Hikikomori
13. Better Off
[3] Pornography - "Metway Sessions"
1. Kafka Dreams
2. Rozencrancts And Guildenstern Are Dead
[4] Adam Kidd - "...From The Bedroom" ('03-'05)
1. Seven
2. Man In The Business Suit
3. Goodbye To Summer
4. Fallen Angel
5. Butterfly March (instrumental)
6. Wasn't It?
7. Waiting
8. Obsolete|Incomplete
9. Seven Stories
10. Wake Up Tired
11. Better Off
12. Frank Sinatra
13. Another Picture In My Mind
14. After The Storm
[5] Adam Kidd - "B" ('00-'04)
1. Don't Go Back
2. Honesty
3. What's Up With You?
4. Teenage Excess
5. Mothers Sons
6. Butterflies
7. Good Advice
8. We Started The War
9. Not For You
10. No One Home
11. Lament
[6] Adam Kidd - "B2" ('05-'08)
1. Instrumental
2. Any Other Night
3. Blueprint
4. End Of The Tunnel
5. George
6. Human Beings (Virtually prequel)
7. Rough Music (The Balancing Act prequel)
8. Snow Globe
9.Venus Or Mars
10. Whisper Round The Room
11.Eileen's Bench
12. My Garden's A Park
[7] Kiyomori - "Gestation" ('03-'05)
1. Once Upon A Time (demo)
2. M*A*D
3. Could've Been
4. Dogtopiary
5. Not Scared Of You (demo)
6. Solution
7. Soft Betrayal
8. She Goes On (demo)
[8] Kiyomori - "Uprising" ('05)
1. Time By Myself
2. None Of The Above
3. She Goes On
4. Speak Clearly
5. Once Upon A Time
6. Not Scared Of You
[9] Kiyomori - "Unfinished|Unreleased" ('05-'08)
1. Banging
2. Deliverance
3. Dance Like A Robot
4. Not In My Name
5. Fighting Fire With Fire
6. Unsung|Unstrung
7. Puppet On A String
8. Gekokujo
9. Invisible Hands
10. What Goes Around
11. Bird In A Cage (Part 2)
12. The World They Built For Us
13. More To Lose
14. Tick Tock
[10] Adam Kidd - "Sketch (solo demo's for LFLIIP)" ('06-'09)
1. Virtually
2. Into The Night
3. I Won't Tell If You Won't
4. Sunshine
5. Just A Fool
6. Smile
7. Fragile Creatures
8. Have It Their Way
9. Bird in a Cage
10. Slow Down
11. This Strange Dance
12. A Message
[11] Adam Kidd Band - "Looking For Love In Inappropriate Places" ('10)
1. All You Believe In
2. Fragile Creatures
3. Into The Night
4. Bird In A Cage
5. I Won't Tell If You Won't
6. Just A Fool
7. Empty Head
8. Sunshine
9. Slow Down
10. Virtually
11. This Strange Dance
12. A Message
[12] Adam Kidd - "Skeletons In The Closet" ('10-'11)
1. The End Of The World (For Two)
2. Down In The Basement
3. Stowaways
4. Peter Wallner
5. The Stumbling Block
6. When The Dust Settles
7. The Balancing Act
8. Dear Michael
9. Drink The Cup
10. She Makes Me Nervous
11. Fragments of Memory
12. 5/4-6/4
13. Catching Up
[13 + 14] The Pocketwatchers - "Pocketwatching Vol 1 & 2" ('08-'11)
*not formally collected so random track order
1. Cain
2. Keep Falling (With Love)
3. Santa Muerte
4. Speedball II (remix)
5. Heroes
6. Honesty
7. Hands
8. The Journey
9. Dance With Jolie
10. The Pocketwatchers Theme
11. Attack Of The Wraiths
12. Dimitri's Abortion
13. Synaesthesia
14. Storm Clouds
15. Peter Kicks The Wolf
16. The Cowboy Song
All quiet on the bloggy front?
Yes, I've been silent for a few weeks. There have been lost of changes afoot and I wasn't sure whether to talk about them, or what to say if I did, so I thought I'd keep schtum for the time being. You see, I set up this site as a personal blog, but also with the main purpose of blogging all things 'Adam Kidd Band' related... and then a few weeks back, I suspended blogging activity because 'Adam Kidd Band' ceased to exist.
Fear not though, dear reader, for this marks no end to music-making. We are continuing with the new name Fragile Creatures... which isn't exactly a new name really, it's actually an old song title that suddenly appeared to work conveneintly well as a band name, I'm not sure why we didn't think of it earlier as 'Adam Kidd Band' made me feel a little uneasy every time I had to tell people what my group was called. It wasn't only a name change though, as I doubt that would have caused my temporary silence, no, unfortunately we also asked my brother Ben to leave the band.
All this change his given me a good moment to look back and take stock of where I am and what I've been doing. I've been organising my archive of demo recordings just to get a sense of how much work I have done over the last decade... I turn 30 later this year, so it seems a good time to be doing this archival work, along with running the Brighton Marathon last month (3 hours 47 mins on my first marathon yo!) so I'm in the best physical shape of my life, I know where I've been and I know where I'm heading as I enter my fourth decade!!!
So the batch of songs I've nearly finished recording at the moment can be considered as my fourth solo album - although one of these is more a collection of odds and sods than a distinct period of song-writing, as the other three are. My solo or demo albums are consistently low-fi recordings, I use the recording process as a song-writing tool, finishing off songs by making a sketch of tunes I've been writing on guitar... so they are totally warts and all and not ever really intended for the general public... but I have to confess I am often particularily fond of these versions... as nasty as the production may be (and I'll happily admit to being a terrible drummer/keyboardist), but in these versions the songs are at their purest... the first time they've been performed as a finished song is often in the take that forms the core of the demo/solo album version.
Besides my solo albums, and the Adam Kidd Band album we recorded last year, there's also music I've made with/as rift, Kiyomori and The Pocketwatchers. Rift made the Opal Fruits album (my first) in 1997-8, and followed it with My False Smile EP, Metway Sessions EP, Bitter EP and The Bedroom Demo... all of which could be collected into a 2nd album. Kiyomori released the Uprising EP, but we had a lot of material floating around when we went on hiatus, I've always been keen to collect this stuff together onto a disc as a sort of posthumous album, but I don't have access to a lot of the sessions (if they still exist) and don't even have all the mixes... the Kiyomori beast is not quite dead yet though - we even played a gig this year and now Ben isn't in my band I'd like to keep working with him in some capacity, so Kiyomori may well be it!! The Pocketwatchers have recorded tonnes of material, I saw Andy Haines at the weekend and we agreed it would be a good way to spend a day assessing what we've done and grouping it into collections. I'd say there's definitely 2 albums worth there, possibly three!
So there you have it folks, including the one I'm working on right now I've recorded at least 10 albums worth of material since I started making my own music, which was probably 1996, or possibly 1995. I'm quite pleased with that!!!
[Think I'll start making the full discography in another blog... I love lists!!!]
Fear not though, dear reader, for this marks no end to music-making. We are continuing with the new name Fragile Creatures... which isn't exactly a new name really, it's actually an old song title that suddenly appeared to work conveneintly well as a band name, I'm not sure why we didn't think of it earlier as 'Adam Kidd Band' made me feel a little uneasy every time I had to tell people what my group was called. It wasn't only a name change though, as I doubt that would have caused my temporary silence, no, unfortunately we also asked my brother Ben to leave the band.
All this change his given me a good moment to look back and take stock of where I am and what I've been doing. I've been organising my archive of demo recordings just to get a sense of how much work I have done over the last decade... I turn 30 later this year, so it seems a good time to be doing this archival work, along with running the Brighton Marathon last month (3 hours 47 mins on my first marathon yo!) so I'm in the best physical shape of my life, I know where I've been and I know where I'm heading as I enter my fourth decade!!!
So the batch of songs I've nearly finished recording at the moment can be considered as my fourth solo album - although one of these is more a collection of odds and sods than a distinct period of song-writing, as the other three are. My solo or demo albums are consistently low-fi recordings, I use the recording process as a song-writing tool, finishing off songs by making a sketch of tunes I've been writing on guitar... so they are totally warts and all and not ever really intended for the general public... but I have to confess I am often particularily fond of these versions... as nasty as the production may be (and I'll happily admit to being a terrible drummer/keyboardist), but in these versions the songs are at their purest... the first time they've been performed as a finished song is often in the take that forms the core of the demo/solo album version.
Besides my solo albums, and the Adam Kidd Band album we recorded last year, there's also music I've made with/as rift, Kiyomori and The Pocketwatchers. Rift made the Opal Fruits album (my first) in 1997-8, and followed it with My False Smile EP, Metway Sessions EP, Bitter EP and The Bedroom Demo... all of which could be collected into a 2nd album. Kiyomori released the Uprising EP, but we had a lot of material floating around when we went on hiatus, I've always been keen to collect this stuff together onto a disc as a sort of posthumous album, but I don't have access to a lot of the sessions (if they still exist) and don't even have all the mixes... the Kiyomori beast is not quite dead yet though - we even played a gig this year and now Ben isn't in my band I'd like to keep working with him in some capacity, so Kiyomori may well be it!! The Pocketwatchers have recorded tonnes of material, I saw Andy Haines at the weekend and we agreed it would be a good way to spend a day assessing what we've done and grouping it into collections. I'd say there's definitely 2 albums worth there, possibly three!
So there you have it folks, including the one I'm working on right now I've recorded at least 10 albums worth of material since I started making my own music, which was probably 1996, or possibly 1995. I'm quite pleased with that!!!
[Think I'll start making the full discography in another blog... I love lists!!!]
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